Talking Heads, Sept. 28: Poverty leads, Cormorants follow

After today’s report from the National Council of Welfare, Nycole Turmel was quick to her feet in QP to ask the prime minister why Canada tolerates poverty. “Why not a strategy to end poverty, save money and help the economy?” she asked.

Stephen Harper was having none of it. How about job creation as a poverty strategy, he asked — though not exactly in those words.

He later took Bob Rae to task for another question on the economy. “This government’s economic record has been mandated by the Canadian people and praised by analysts around the world,” the PM said. “Frankly, everybody in this country has the right to lecture the hon. member about how he managed the Ontario economy.”

Jim Flaherty was up to answer questions from Peggy Nash and Andrew Cash. “We are going to return to a balanced budget,” he told them. “We think that is important and I am sure the member opposite would agree, looking at the trouble that some other countries in the world have gotten into by accumulating substantial deficits over time and building up large public debt.”

The G8 also came up, of course. Charlie Angus noted that Tony Clement has been in the “doghouse’ for 111 days. “The minister personally intervened and moved it out of the Muskoka slush fund and said he would get the funding elsewhere,” Angus charged. “Now the documents show this gave the three amigos, the major, hotel manager and the minister, a much larger pot of goodies.”

John Baird replied on Clement’s behalf, as he has done all week. “The facts on this issue have not changed,” he said. “This has been thoroughly aired.”

And, the foreign minister added, “what Canadians expect their members of Parliament to be doing is to be focusing on their priorities: The creation of jobs, employment, economic growth, hope and opportunity.” He then said the government is focusing “like a laser” on those priorities.

Hope is perhaps new on that list, but is as subjective as anything else.

It’s clear the NDP are still hoping for answers from Clement, who said Wednesday morning he’d appear before the public account committee sometime in the future, along with Baird and Transport and Infrastructure Minister Denis Lebel.

“I don’t know when he’s going to show up,” NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus told reporters after QP. “I don’t know how many of his posse he’s going to have to bring. But, at the end of the day, he’s personally accountable.”

The Liberals hoped for much the same as the NDP Wednesday, along with hoping Peter MacKay would answer for his use of a Cormorant helicopter that he commandeered to lift him from a fishing holiday in a remote corner of Newfoundland and Labrador. MacKay likely hoped the questions would stop.

“As I said a number of times,” he told the Speaker after a question from Liberal MP Gerry Byrne about the trip, “I was on personal time in Gander, Newfoundland with some friends on a trip I paid for myself.”

Even the Prime Minister weighed in, after being asked by Liberal Scott Andrews whether MacKay had been acting “extraordinarily unethically or extraordinarily stupidly.” Harper repeated what MacKay said moments earlier, before suggesting that “if anyone in the Liberal Party actually has any evidence that the minister or anyone else acted improperly, he or she can say so outside the House.”

Meanwhile, the backbenches of the Conservative side, Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost hoped Wednesday that the government’s plan for funding Planned Parenthood (IPPF) could be fought. After posting a statement to his website in the afternoon, he told CBC’s Evan Solomon on Power and Politics that he (and others in the Conservative caucus) don’t believe that funding the organization is a good way to spend taxpayer money. But with the Prime Minister so adamantly stating that he would not reopen the abortion debate, what can we make of this, Solomon asked.